Out with the Old Masters?

I SPENT THE EARLY DAYS OF LOCKDOWN writing and rewriting the conclusion to a book on the history of museums since the Second World War (actually, since the opening of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1939), desperately trying to figure out what the effect of a gigantic pandemic is likely to be.

Will reopened museums continue more or less as they are — confident spaces of great civic grandeur, funded by a combination of the state and private sector? Or will they have to retreat and retrench as public funding takes a battering and as private donors are bruised by the attacks on the sources of their wealth and their motives for giving?

Now, nine months on, and close to the publication of the book, The Art (Thames & Hudson) in March, I am not much clearer as to the answer. On the one hand, I see no signs of those museums with ambitious development plans retreating from them or changing what they are planning to do. In Narbonne in the south of France, Norman Foster has been working on a brand-new Musée de la Romanité in Narbonne (MuRéNA), which is due to open in the spring. It is an immense and very ambitious project, all on a single storey, designed to give a feel of walking round a rediscovered Roman villa, with a great wall of stone funerary blocks which were recovered from the city walls during the nineteenth century.